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May 29th, 2019
On Thursday, May 23, a Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations was held at Purdue University. Ashlee Messersmith, manager, thesis/dissertation, The Graduate School at Purdue University, and Michael Witt, associate professor, Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies, organized the event, with support from the United States Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Association (USETDA).
By Michael Witt, Head, Distributed Data Curation Center (D2C2), and Associate Professor of Library Science
The presenters at the Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) highlighted a wide variety of creative works produced by graduate students in earning their degrees, such as:
Graduate students will typically prepare and defend a written thesis, even if their research can be communicated in a more meaningful or impactful format than a document. There are other examples, such as software source code and research data, videos and photos from exhibits and performances, mixed media, dynamic websites, and much more produced by students; but this type of content is often left out of a traditional thesis.
In some cases, these non-traditional works could be considered as the primary product of the students’ scholarship — without the need for a written thesis.
Recent changes to the policies of Purdue’s Graduate School reflect a progressive approach and support for non-traditional theses, embracing both the opportunities and challenges they present for the Purdue’s faculty, thesis office, and libraries.
“As emerging technologies continue to influence higher education, we needed to set a precedent through which students are permitted to express their creativity,” Messersmith explained. “Exploring these influences and their implications was the focus of the symposium, which was held in the Wilmeth Active Learning Center. We invited experts to share ideas and brainstorm with participants who supervise theses and manage the processes and platforms for producing and archiving them.”
The opening keynote presentation by Professor and Dean of Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro Martin Halbert addressed the landscape and life cycle of electronic theses and dissertations, as well as the ETDPlus resource.
The closing keynote, delivered by Jean-Pierre Hérubel, professor, Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies, dove into the history and culture of the doctoral dissertation, as well as variations and transformations of its purpose and form.
Other presentations from Purdue faculty and staff explored issues related to student perspectives, digital humanities, graduate college policies, research data management, digital preservation, and scholarly publishing. Throughout the symposium, participants discussed important questions related to sharing current practices; interfacing with faculty to observe and respect local cultures related to credentialing students; identifying concerns and opportunities for graduate colleges, libraries, and technology providers; and increasing collaboration within the University and among universities. A lively round of lightning talks in the afternoon featured specific examples of theses that challenge conventions from other universities.
Presentation slides and collaborative notes from the symposium are available on Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies’ e-Pubs repository at https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/etdgiantleaps/.
Filed under: events, faculty_staff, general
May 28th, 2019
Philip Roth Studies is a peer-reviewed semiannual journal published by Purdue University Press in cooperation with the Philip Roth Society. The journal publishes writing pertaining entirely or in part to Philip Roth, his fiction, and his literary and cultural significance.
Philip Roth Studies Volume 15, Issue 1, out this month, will be the final issue for executive co-editors Debra Shostak and David Brauner. We spoke to them about their experience, Philip Roth’s passing, and the future of the journal.
Q: PRS 15.1 is special for a few reasons; could you explain its significance?
Debra Shostak and David Brauner: The spring 2019 issue of Philip Roth Studies, volume 15, is professionally and personally momentous for us as editors, and we hope it will be as meaningful to our readers as it is to us. PRS 15.1 is valedictory, not only because it is the last issue we will have overseen before turning the Executive Co-editorship of the journal over to the capable hands of Aimee Pozorski and Maren Scheurer, but also, and even more movingly for us, because we are honoring the late Philip Roth, who died in May of 2018, with a special memorial issue.
To remember Roth as a writer who has brought so many of us together within the pages of PRS over nearly fifteen years, we invited reflective essays from eighteen scholars who have contributed significantly to the study of his work, mostly in monographs devoted significantly or wholly to Roth. We are also thrilled to publish what we think may be the last scholarly interview Roth granted, to Elèna Mortara, who has edited the Italian editions of his work for the prestigious literary series Meridiani Mondadori. Our line-up of contributors is stellar—in alphabetical order, Victoria Aarons, Ann Basu, Alan Cooper, David Gooblar, Jay Halio, Patrick Hayes, Brett Ashley Kaplan, Michael Kimmage, Pia Masiero, Maggie McKinley, Catherine Morley, Ira Nadel, Patrick O’Donnell, Timothy Parrish, Aimee Pozorski, and Matthew Shipe—and their offerings are brilliant, heartfelt, at times humorous (and we two have exploited our executive editor privilege to include our own reflections as well). The essays run from memories of meeting Roth and of attending his funeral, to musings on the profound, often disorienting, effects of his fiction on us as readers and critics. Contributors meditate on Roth’s attachment to Newark, New Jersey, on the sexual politics of his fiction, on his allusions to children, on his deep and troubled connection to the American history to which he faithfully, sometimes mercilessly, bore witness, on how he speaks to the present moment, on his devotion to literary pleasures, and on his fictive conversations with his literary forebears. Others revisit The Human Stain, Sabbath’s Theater, and American Pastoral. Without exception, the essays demonstrate Roth’s vital, unabated presence among us all—in his language, his stories, his inexhaustible formal invention, his integrity, his daring—even though he is no longer living among us to delight us yet again.
We, David and Deb, are bidding farewell to the many pleasures of editing Philip Roth Studies, but we will never bid farewell to the boundless, bottomless Philip Roth.
Q: What got you interested in studying Philip Roth? Was there a particular work that you feel most inspired your interest?
David: I first encountered Roth’s work when, as a teenager, I picked up a copy of Portnoy’s Complaint at random from my parents’ bookshelves, knowing nothing about it. In spite of the temporal and geographical gap between my own circumstances—growing up in a London suburb in the 1970s and 80s—and those of the protagonist—growing up in New Jersey in the 1940s and 50s—I felt an immediate thrill of recognition. It articulated brilliantly—and hilariously—what I later called a “transnational Jewish sensibility,” the profound ambivalence of Jews in the post-war period towards both their own Jewishness and the larger culture. There was then a hiatus of a number of years before, as a graduate student, I read The Counterlife. That was the book that got me hooked—I went on to read, systematically, everything that Roth had written and I began to write about his work. What struck me most powerfully about The Counterlife was the way it combined ingenious metafiction with compelling domestic drama and big political, historical, and existential questions. Later, Sabbath’s Theater was the novel that cemented my conviction of Roth’s pre-eminence among contemporary novelists: I remember vividly as I read it the first time thinking “this is one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read” and each successive re-reading has only reinforced my belief that this is Roth’s masterpiece.
Deb: My encounter—and fascination—with Roth’s work runs parallel to David’s in several ways. I remember seeing the vivid yellow cover of Portnoy’s Complaint on my parents’ bookshelves during my early adulthood, but I never picked it up. Instead, after hearing a casual recommendation in the late 1980s, I read The Counterlife. I was at once enthralled—by Roth’s dizzying formal experiment, his antic humor, his unique voice, and the magical touch by which he could make that most reflexive of novels seem like familiar realism in its treatment of family, history, and selfhood. I never anticipated how much that book would reshape my professional life. I felt driven to try to write about it, and then, reading through all of Roth’s work and eagerly awaiting each new volume, I never looked back. I was captivated by the hard questions he asked about American history, politics, and manhood, and by the many pleasures of his sentences. Like David, I judge Sabbath’s Theater to be Roth’s masterpiece, but for me, Operation Shylock runs a close second. If I had to guess which novels will most centrally keep Roth’s work alive for readers in the coming years, though, I’d probably point to his powerful treatment of twentieth-century America, “real” and all-too-real: in the American Trilogy and The Plot Against America.
Q: How do you think Roth’s death will affect the study of his work?
Deb and David: In the short term, it will stimulate scholarship, as critics reassess his work and his legacy in the round. In the longer term, there is a danger that interest in his work may wane—we have seen this happen with a number of his contemporaries, such as Saul Bellow and John Updike. However, our gut instinct is that this won’t be Roth’s fate—we think his work is more thoroughly embedded in the canon than that of any of his peers and, as we have seen with the recent renewed attention paid to The Plot Against America since Trump’s election, it continues to resonate powerfully in our contemporary moment.
Q: What do you feel have been your greatest achievements with the journal during your tenure, and what are you excited to see from the journal moving forward?
Deb and David: We are particularly proud of the number of younger scholars we have featured in the journal over the period of our editorship. One of these, Maren Scheurer, has now, together with Aimee Pozorski, taken over from us as Executive Co-Editor of the journal, and many others, who published their first peer-reviewed pieces with PRS, have gone on to establish themselves as important new voices in the discipline. Other notable features of our tenure have been the number of excellent special issues we have published and the range of other authors with whose work Roth’s has been placed in dialogue. Overall, the last five years have seen a significant extension of the parameters of Roth studies and we are proud that the journal has been at the forefront of this work. We are confident that Aimee and Maren will build on this legacy and continue to take Roth studies in new and exciting directions.
See more about Philip Roth Studies and subscription information.
Filed under: Uncategorized
May 27th, 2019
In the history of flight and space, there are two monumental events that stand out: one was the Wright Brothers’ achievement of the first power-controlled flight, and the other was when Neil Armstrong became the first human to step foot on the moon.
Located in the Purdue University Archives and Special Collections (ASC), the Barron Hilton Flight and Space Exploration Archives collection was created to document and preserve Purdue University’s relationship to flight and space exploration. Recently, Neil Armstrong’s widow, Carol Armstrong, donated two pieces of fabric from the wings of the original Wright Brothers flyer, built in 1903 and flown at Kitty Hawk. This donation, to the Barron Hilton Flight and Space Exploration Archives at Purdue, bridges these two pivotal flight and space events, connecting the Purdue family all the way back to the birth of aviation by powered flight.
Archivists in the Purdue ASC, a division of Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies, announced the gift of the fabric pieces, each measuring approximately 25 in. x 24 in., at a private reception last month. The pieces are particularly important because they were given to Neil Armstrong to take with him on the Apollo 11 mission aboard his historic landing of the Eagle lunar module on the moon. Along with the fabric, Carol Armstrong donated related correspondence from 1969 between the Air Force Museum and Neil Armstrong regarding the Wright Flyer fabric.
Barron Hilton Archivist for Flight and Space Exploration and Associate Head of Archives and Special Collections Tracy Grimm noted this gift bridges the history of flight and space and cements the Barron Hilton Flight and Space Exploration Archives as a resource that documents powered flight back to its very beginnings.
“To know that this one piece of fabric connects the first lunar landing with the first airplane flight is astonishing,” Grimm said. “To think that Orville and Wilbur Wright and Neil Armstrong all touched and held this fabric is incredible. It shows that Neil honored the pioneers who came before him, just as we honor his accomplishments. Objects like this fabric bring the past into the present and help us understand history in a tangible way. We know that people from history who do courageous things and realize near-impossible dreams are people who inspire future brave leaders and bold thinkers. Seeing the physical artifacts, documents, and photos that tell their stories makes history real to us in a way that is far more meaningful and vivid than a story in a textbook,” she added.
Purdue’s ownership of the Armstrong Papers—all 450+ boxes of his manuscripts, personal papers, and working files, alongside this recent addition of the Wright Brothers flyer fabric—are all due to the generosity of Neil and Carol Armstrong. Armstrong began giving his papers to Purdue, his alma mater, during his lifetime and his wife, Carol, continued to honor their wishes over time. This latest donation is one such example of how the collection has grown rapidly due to the Armstrong’s generosity.
Head of Archives and Special Collections, Professor Sammie L. Morris noted the special private unveiling ceremony held recently at Purdue as an exciting moment.
“With these exemplary collections of flight and space history, and as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission this year, we show how Purdue has helped the world advance in transportation and exploration,” Morris said. “It is so fitting that the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 coincides with Purdue’s 150th birthday this year, cementing forever the close relationship Purdue has had to flight and space history from its beginnings.”
Filed under: general, SPECMay 23rd, 2019
Recently, two members of Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies faculty were selected to receive a Research Data Award from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NNLM). The $20,000 grant award for the project, “Understanding Rates of Attrition in Biomedical Data Challenges: A Study of Failure,” will enable Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies Assistant Professor Bethany McGowan and Associate Professor Ilana Stonebraker to provide research data management training to students.
The award will facilitate a variety of training workshops including: FAIR Data Principles; Research Data Management Basics: Finding and Organizing Data; Cleaning and Formatting Data with OpenRefine; General Tips for Visualizing Biomedical Data; Biomedical Data Visualization with Tableau; and Useful R Packages for Analyzing and Visualizing Biomedical Data. The grant period began May 1 and will conclude April 30, 2020.
The workshops are part of a larger research project through which McGowan and Stonebraker will conduct a study to understand rates of attrition in biomedical data challenges.
“Our study will examine student motivation for participation in extracurricular innovation challenges, such as hackathons and case competitions, which involve the use of biomedical data, in an attempt to understand failure and reduce rates of attrition in these events,” said McGowan, who is the project lead.
In addition to presenting results of their research at conferences throughout the year, McGowan and Stonebraker will develop a digital open-education resource toolkit to help guide librarians in recruiting for and retaining diverse student populations in data-hacking challenges.
According to the NNLM’s Greater Midwest Region (GMR) website, the project supports Goal 3 of the National Library of Medicine’s Strategic Plan, which is to build a workforce for data-driven research and health.
“It supports the aligning objectives to expand and enhance research training for biomedical informatics and data science, to assure data science and open science proficiency, to increase workforce diversity, and to engage the next generation and promote data literacy,” states the NNLM GMR website.
Filed under: Faculty E-Newsletter, faculty_staff, general, PSETMay 17th, 2019
Every story has untold pieces. Purdue University Archives and Special Collections contains millions of stories in the many papers, books, objects, items, and other memorabilia carefully preserved and stored there. Yet, it does not hold them all—particularly those that may have not been “judged to be…important,” as noted in the introduction of the new online exhibit, “Voices, Identities & Silences: Investigating 150 Years of Diversity in Purdue Archives.”
The exhibit is the result of a graduate course led by Purdue University Archivist and Professor Sammie Morris this past spring semester.
The exhibit’s introduction notes that Purdue’s past, present, and future are comprised of much more than stories about feats associated with its engineering programs, its tales about athletic teams, or its strides in agricultural research and practice. It also explains why the student curators took on this effort:
[N]ot all of this history is (or will be) preserved in the University’s archive. Inevitably, some people and events are judged to be more important and thus more worthy of preservation. Our exhibit, then, aims to focus attention on elements of Purdue’s history that have been otherwise overlooked, not in order to ‘correct’ that history but rather to expand it and (if our aim is true) change our understanding of what ‘counts’ as that history in the first place. — Voices, Identities & Silences: Investigating 150 Years of Diversity in Purdue Archives
According to Morris, the idea for the course coincided with Purdue University’s faculty and staff members’ preparation for Purdue’s Sesquicentennial.
“As Purdue’s 150th anniversary approached, I often found myself reflecting on how the history of Purdue is preserved in the Archives, but not completely. There are many hidden gaps or silences representing people in Purdue history whose stories have not been widely known,” Morris said. “I began thinking about ways to fill in gaps in Purdue history, while engaging students in learning archival research skills.”
The course, too, coincided with Purdue Libraries’ expansion of its teaching mission through the creation of the new “Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies.”
“With digital humanities being one area the new school focuses on, the course offered the right opportunity to teach digital scholarship methods while providing students the opportunity to delve into Purdue’s lesser-known history,” Morris explained. “The overarching goal for students was to learn how to conduct archival research, but the broader goal was to benefit from the results of their research projects by highlighting diversity in Purdue’s past. Students in the course were encouraged to consider the identity of Purdue and how their experiences as students today are preserved. Students learned how the records of their experiences (that are preserved in the Archives) become sources of study for scholars in the future.”
Students in Morris’ class each focused on an individual era and/or topic in Purdue’s history, and the contents covered in the online exhibit are the result of each student’s work. For instance, Lee Hibbard, a third-year Ph.D. student in the Purdue Department of English studying rhetoric and composition, focused on queer life in the 2000s at Purdue.
“The work on the exhibit was entirely collaborative, with every person taking on distinct roles both on the front and back end of the exhibit’s appearance and contents,” Hibbard explained. “To come up with the title, we took a portion of class time and brainstormed some ideas together. The title came about as we played with the theme of the course and our process of research, as well as what we wanted viewers to take away from the exhibit. The wording was especially important to us as Purdue students wanting to tell a coherent narrative that depicted our goals for the exhibit, as well as the things we took away from the course as a whole,” he added.
“The three core pieces of archival work we focused on—voices, identities, and silences—became the first part of the title. The second half emphasized our process, which was very much a journey of going through the archives with an eye towards investigating diversity, rather than discovering,” Hibbard continued. “Discovery has an end point while Investigation is a process, and even though we all uncovered many interesting and fascinating examples of diversity, all of us felt by the end of the course that we had just scratched the surface of our areas, and could easily return to them to try and learn more.”
Hibbard, who is also interested in archival practices, noted that he found this course essential to unpacking the complex ideas he had for his dissertation.
“At the beginning of the semester, I knew I wanted to look at some archival things, but didn’t have the tools to do so. After a spring of reading complex theory, getting hands-on archival experience, and learning the importance of selection and curation in an exhibit setting, I feel more comfortable with the prospect of working with archives for my dissertation and my future scholarship as a whole,” he said.
Like his fellow students in the course, Hibbard chose to home in on a specific area of Purdue’s history because of his personal stake and interest in the selected topic and era.
“As a queer person, specifically a transgender man, I am very interested in the way support and networks for queer students developed at Purdue during the time that I was an undergraduate (2006-2010) at a similar large Midwestern university (University of Nebraska in Lincoln),” he explained.
Shortly before the end of the Spring 2019 semester, students in Morris’ course shared their personal stories about their work on the exhibit at a small, private reception held in the Archives and Special Collections. Below are more photos from that reception.
May 6th, 2019
Purdue at 150: A Visual History of Student Life by David M. Hovde, Adriana Harmeyer, Neal Harmeyer, and Sammie L. Morris with a Foreword by Drew and Brittany Brees tells Purdue’s story through rare images, artifacts, and words. The authors culled decades of student papers from scrapbooks, yearbooks, letters, and newspapers to historical photographs and memorabilia preserved in the Purdue University Libraries Virginia Kelley Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center. Many of the images and artifacts included have never been published, presenting a unique history of the land-grant university from the student perspective.
What prompted the authors to undertake such a monumental task? Where do you start when you have the entirety of the archives as your source? We asked the authors to take us inside the process of making Purdue at 150.
Q: What prompted you to start this project?
David Hovde: I have spent most of my writing career, beginning in 1973, writing historical works. When I started to work in the Archives and Special Collections in 2006, I read everything I could about the history of Purdue using primary, secondary, and tertiary sources. Then, I started to teach classes about how to do historical research using archival resources. I quickly noticed that the students were far more attentive when I discussed material created by students from Purdue’s past rather than material about presidents and famous faculty. The students could relate to the students of the past. At the same time, I noted that few official histories really discussed students and their lives on campus. Their voices were largely silent. Since I have a long-standing interest in folklore, I also noticed how much of the campus folklore had little basis in fact. For a number of years, I mulled over the idea writing a book about student life and student customs and traditions. When the sesquicentennial was approaching, I presented the idea to Sammie Morris and the entire staff, and the rest so to speak is history. The book is a bit different than what I had envisioned years ago, but this is a collaborative effort and that collaboration brilliantly highlights the collections in the Purdue University Archives and Special Collections and is strengthened by the many voices of those who contributed to the final product.
Sammie Morris: The Archives and Special Collections unit began discussing and preparing for the Purdue sesquicentennial many years in advance. One thing we discussed early on was a coffee table type book that would include beautiful realistic facsimiles of treasures from the Archives that provide evidence of Purdue’s past. We tossed around ideas about a scrapbook style album, or something featuring historical images and student memorabilia. David Hovde had a suggestion that we work together on a book project and there was a lot of enthusiasm amongst the staff in the Archives on taking on this challenge. From the start, it was important to me that we focus on filling in gaps in the past histories of Purdue by telling stories of some of the lesser known individuals and events in our history. As John Norberg worked to create an updated comprehensive Purdue history we differentiated our books by focusing solely on student experiences and featuring only items that are part of the Archives and Special Collections’ holdings. In this way, we let the evidence existing in the Archives tell the story of Purdue’s past students, while being aware that there are many gaps in the archival record that we would like to fill and enhance in the future.
Q: How does one start the process of gathering all the materials needed for a project like this?
David: I began my post-college career as an archaeologist. Archival research is like archaeology. On a dig, you slowly and carefully peel back the layers of soil, recording the artifacts and their places on the site both horizontally and vertically and place each artifact in context with all the others on the site, sites in the region, and the time period the site represents. Archival research is much the same. Each document or artifact is a story and part of a larger whole. Each file, photograph, or box is a layer, and each relates to all the other files and boxes that tell the story of the site. A document is an artifact, a collection a layer, and each relates to other artifacts and collections temporally and spatially. The site in this case is the history of Purdue University. Each document, photograph, and artifact is equally as important as the others, and together they contribute to the story. This book has fifteen cultural layers that make up the site known as Purdue University.
As with any project, one starts looking at the secondary and tertiary sources and then the voice is chosen. In this case, the voice was the students. Then the structure is developed, and the researchers begins to look for primary sources, scrapbooks, photographs, letters, documents, etc., that bring the voice of the participant in the story to the forefront and gives the story life.
Prior to this, I had written a number of short articles about student traditions that would be the basis for a web site about Purdue student customs and traditions and to aid the staff to help students and researchers with questions about such things. These became elements of the future book. No one person in this collaboration knows all the collections. The authors each have their expertise and individual interests, but all wanted to give voice to the students who came and went over the past 145 years.
Adriana Harmeyer: We decided early on that we would let the archival materials tell the story. We reviewed the items in the Archives, thought about which ones are most interesting, surprising, and engaging, and built the story from there. There are some seminal moments and traditions that we knew would have to be included and were able to find archival materials that would illustrate them.
Sammie: It was a big undertaking. We wanted something new and fresh that didn’t retell past Purdue histories and we wanted something that would complement, rather than compete with, John Norberg’s forthcoming book. With 150 years of history come 150 years of documents, photos, and artifacts. There are thousands of boxes of these records in the archives, but we had to start somewhere. Once we decided to focus on student life and organizing the book by decade, it helped us to hone in on what collections we had on those topics. We also made a serious effort to seek out—to the best of our abilities—diverse stories and perspectives, focusing not exclusively on famous alumni, but rather trying to tell the story of the average student experience by decade. We wanted to show that all Purdue students played a role in shaping the university, and we wanted to represent as many voices and perspectives as possible.
Q: What was your favorite decade to research?
David: I would say the 1900s, since that was the decade the many of the long standing and most colorful traditions were established or codified.
Adriana: I really enjoyed diving into the 1910s. So much was happening at that time as enrollment grew, old traditions faded, and new traditions developed. By the end of the decade, World War I really helped define what Purdue and the community could offer to the world.
Neal Harmeyer: My favorite decade to research was the 2010s. Studying archival content from the very recent past helped me to connect current issues and topics to those from past decades.
Sammie: I love the 1930s, it’s this fascinating time in American history between the two world wars when art and design and culture are becoming more streamlined and modern, Prohibition was ending, Art Deco was popular, and women were beginning to have more freedom after earning the right to vote in 1920. It also happens to be the decade when two women heroes of mine joined Purdue: Lillian Gilbreth and Amelia Earhart. It was the decade when Purdue opened the first university-owned airport. I just feel like there was a lot of growth and excitement, at Purdue, and in the U.S. during the 1930s. There was this can-do spirit seen in photos and documents that seemed celebratory despite the effects of the Great Depression. It was a fascinating time of highs and lows.
Q: Was there a single photo that you enjoyed the most that sticks out to you?
David: One of the most difficult parts of a book like this is choosing the best photo to tell a particular story. Sometimes there could be three or four similar images you like, but only one can be used. I like the photo on page 24 of the students being students, the two women on page 28, and the three women on page 34 showing early campus life of women. I also like the victors and the defeated on page 41, particularly the look of concern by the student with 08 sign hung around his neck.
Adriana Harmeyer: There are so many great photos in this book! One that comes immediately to mind, probably because I had never seen it until this project, is of Olympian Clifford C. Furnas running through ankle-deep water at a state track meeting as crowds cheer him on. This photo originally appeared in the 1922 Debris Yearbook, a great source of historical images.
Neal Harmeyer: I enjoy many of the images within the book. One that stands out is an image of the entrance to campus at State and Marsteller Streets in the 1940s. The intersection looks very different today.
Q: What were some of your favorite photos that didn’t end up making it into the book?
David: The one that did not make it in the book, because it is so commonly used, is Fred Hovde walking with a group of young men, some in World War II military clothing. The confident stride and the smiles reflect the new beginnings, growth, and promise of Hovde’s vision of a comprehensive research university and the GI Bill.
Adriana Harmeyer: There is a nice photo album from the 1930s, called “Purdue Panels,” that is filled with campus scenes. My favorite part of it, though, is the cover, which has sketches of the Power Plant and Heavilon Hall. It is a simple but eye-catching illustration of what the most prominent features of campus were at that time.
Neal Harmeyer: My favorite photos that did not make the book were a comparison of State Street during and after the redevelopment project of the 2010s.
Q: Were there any Purdue legends or stories that you found to be untrue?
David: Gobs and gobs…In particular, all those that start with, “In John Purdue’s will…” He did not have a will and all those stories about no foreign language instruction, red brick, no building taller than University Hall, etc., are completely bogus.
Q: Neal, what is it like being involved in a project as a Purdue alum?
Neal Harmeyer: Working on this book as an alumnus was an interesting experience. I have spent many years in and around Purdue University, first as a student and later as a professional archivist, and through those experiences many historical details were already known to me. Yet, there are always new things to learn, and I was learned numerous facts during the research process. I found it fascinating each time a new fact was uncovered or myth debunked. Therefore, I am certain that anyone connected to Purdue will learn something from Purdue at 150.
Q: How similar is the work that you did for this book to the work that you do at the archives?
David: From the beginning, one of my roles was to recover lost bits of Purdue’s history and put dates, names, and context onto numerous photographs in the collection. Much of what is in the book cannot be found in other published Purdue histories.
Adriana Harmeyer: This book felt like a natural extension of our work in the Archives. We often assist researchers in identifying archival materials to help with their projects, and by working with these collections every day most of us have a good understanding of the broad strokes of Purdue history. This book gave us a chance to dive a little more deeply into the collections and piece together more of those historical details. I also manage the Archives social media accounts, so I am very familiar with identifying interesting images and writing descriptive text to accompany them.
Neal: As an archivist I am constantly helping researchers conduct their own research, creating metadata for collections and images alike, composing my findings, and enabling access to Archives and Special Collections content. Working on Purdue at 150 was similar to my daily activities, albeit with a longer research period.
Q: What do the archives provide to Purdue?
David: The Archives and Special Collection since its creation in 1913 strove to collect, arrange, describe, preserve, and make available the records of the University, staff, and alumni. It is not a mere collection because the highly trained professional and knowledgeable staff in the Archives bring the history of this institution to life and preserve it for the future.
Adriana: The Archives are the access point for these stories, housing the original documents, photographs, and objects that are part of the university’s history. However, we are not just a physical location, but a highly skilled team that can work with people through every step of the research process, from identifying primary sources for their research through to donating their own collections to the archives for future generations of researchers to study and enjoy.
Neal: I believe Archives and Special Collections provides unique opportunities for persons of all ages and educational backgrounds to self-discover and create new ideas. The collections with Archives and Special Collections document the histories of individuals, the university, and the community. A visitor may select, learn, and write about topics of their choosing, all while studying the original one-of-a-kind items of their creators. In turn, those studies generate new primary documents to be preserved for the next generations. Archives and Special Collections support research and learning. These are not only places of the past; they are places of the present and places of the future.
Sammie: The University Archives is the memory of Purdue. Here, we collect and manage the evidence of Purdue’s past activities, decisions, accomplishments, and the lives and contributions of its people. When a date or other fact needs to be checked, we provide the documentation for a reliable answer. But much more than that, the Archives is an accumulation of stories of the people who have shaped Purdue—the students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends of the University who have collectively made it what it is. It’s the Archives that preserves those memories for use by current and future generations of Boilermakers, and it’s the archivists who teach students how to do archival research and come to appreciate and connect with Purdue’s history. Finally, the Archives serves as the access point for scholars worldwide interested in writing books, articles, creating films, or exhibits on Purdue history; without the Archives, Purdue’s past would be an unreliable mix of rumors and hearsay, but most importantly, the legacies of so many ordinary people who helped build and sustain Purdue would be difficult to discover. I think the Archives make Purdue history real for people in a way that facts cannot; there is something exciting about learning through interacting with historical documents, photos, and memorabilia, old digital files and media. The past becomes, for a brief moment, the present when one interacts with these relics from history.
Enter code PURDUE30 at checkout on our website to get 30% off Purdue at 150.
Filed under: general, SPECMay 6th, 2019
In celebration of Purdue’s 150th Anniversary on May 6, Purdue University Press is offering a special Giant Leaps Celebration Sale featuring two new books on the University’s history: Ever True: 150 Years of Giant Leaps at Purdue University and Purdue at 150: A Visual History of Student Life.
Take 50% off each book by ordering directly from Purdue University Press at press.purdue.edu or by calling 1-800-247-6553 and use the discount code GiantLeaps at checkout. This special sale ends on May 6 at 11:59pm EST.
Ever True: 150 Years of Giant Leaps at Purdue University by John Norberg with a Foreword by Purdue University President Mitch Daniels captures the essence of our great university. In this volume, Norberg takes readers beyond the iconic redbrick walls of Purdue’s West Lafayette campus to delve into the stories of the faculty, alumni, student, and leaders who make up this remarkable institution’s distinguished history.
President Emeritus Martin C. Jischke calls Norberg’s work, “an engaging, inspiring, and beautifully written history of one of America’s most distinguished public universities. It tells the story of Purdue from its humble origins to its emergence as a preeminent research university.”
Hardback with jacket, 496 pages, 6.75”x9.75” trim size with over 150 illustrations.
Purdue at 150: A Visual History of Student Life by David M. Hovde, Adriana Harmeyer, Neal Harmeyer, and Sammie L. Morris with a Foreword by Drew and Brittany Brees tells Purdue’s story through rare images, artifacts, and words. The authors culled decades of student papers from scrapbooks, yearbooks, letters, and newspapers to historical photographs and memorabilia preserved in the Purdue University Libraries Virginia Kelley Karnes Archives and Special Collections Research Center. Many of the images and artifacts included have never been published, presenting a unique history of the land-grant university from the student perspective.
The Brees’ say in their Foreword, “Purdue at 150 is the definitive visual history of student life at our beloved alma mater, recalling stories through rare images and artifacts as well as words. Whether you are a long-time alumni or a recent graduate, we know you will enjoy the trip down memory lane.”
Hardback with jacket, 280 pages, 10”×13” trim size with over 675 illustrations.
Filed under: general, press_releaseMay 5th, 2019
Parrish Library’s Featured Database will give you a very brief introduction to the basic features of one of our specialized subscription databases. This time we’re featuring Uniworld, brought to you by Uniworld.
Link: http://guides.lib.purdue.edu/az.php?s=71213 is the alphabetical list of the databases specially selected for those in a business program of study. Access the databases off-campus with your Purdue login and password.
Focus: Uniworld contains up-to-date multinational business contact information with listings in over 200 countries, including information on American firms operating in foreign countries and foreign firms operating in the United States.
Tutorial: Click here see the basics of using Uniworld.
Start with this hint: Use the company search page to search for companies by keyword, headquarter location, subsidiaries, or zip code.
Why you should know this database: Uniworld provides accessible, comprehensive contact information on over 20,000 industries that is researched and reviewed daily.
Related Resources
Some other databases you might want to explore, are:
This Featured Database comes to you from the Roland G. Parrish Library of Management & Economics. If you would like more information about this database, or if you would like a demonstration of it for a class, contact parrlib@purdue.edu. Also let us know if you know of a colleague who would benefit from this, or future Featured Databases.
Since usage statistics are an important barometer when databases are up for renewal, tell us your favorite database, and we will gladly promote it. Send an email to parrlib@purdue.edu.
Filed under: database, general, MGMTMay 2nd, 2019
Faculty in the Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies are helping to build the Collaborative Archive & Data Research Environment (CADRE) with Indiana University, the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Microsoft Research, Web of Science, and the National Science Foundation’s regional big data innovation hubs to provide sustainable and standardized data and text mining capabilities for open and licensed big data. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded the two-year project with a National Leadership Grant in September 2018.
According to Purdue Libraries and School of Information Studies Associate Professor Michael Witt—who is among the faculty working on the grant project—the first two datasets being provisioned on the CADRE platform are the bibliographic data from the Web of Science and Microsoft Academic Search. With more than 280 million combined citations, these resources provide a vast and rich dataset for informetric and scientometric research.
To better understand the needs of potential users and applications for research, CADRE is inviting fellowship applications from interested researchers. Once the fellows are selected, they will have early access to the platform. Witt noted that CADRE fellows will:
Six full scholarships are now available for the upcoming International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics at Sapienza University in Rome, to be held Sept. 2-5, 2019.
Interested faculty and graduate students from Purdue should apply via the CADRE website at http://iuni.iu.edu/resources/cadre/fellowship-program by June 25.
For information about CADRE, visit http://iuni.iu.edu/resources/cadre.
Filed under: faculty_staff, general, UncategorizedMay 1st, 2019
Since 2013, Purdue University Libraries has sponsored the “Why I Love Purdue Libraries” video contest.
Each year, the contest — supported by the Purdue Federal Credit Union — is open to all current, enrolled Purdue University students on the West Lafayette campus.
In 2019, all entries were judged by Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies student employees and regular staff members.
Three videos – first, second, and third place – were selected as winners of the first $1,000 prize, second $750 prize, and third $500 prize; the winning entrants and videos are listed below.
Miteum Yoo (undergraduate)
Tae Hyung Kwon (undergraduate)
*$500 prize split equally among the three of them
Filed under: press_release, Uncategorized